Incidents

--> a personal story <--

I am confused, I guess about how to write about being a woman in engineering.

I see on this webpage there is a timeline of public events in which women were categorically discriminated against or made uncomfortable. Sadly to say, none of them surprise me. But I wonder why they have to be public events to be reported? What I find terrifying - as well as statistically compelling - is not that events like this occur with high frequency on a public level, but how often and in what capacity they have happened in my one personal life. What's so striking about discrimination is that it's on all levels, occurring in an incredible variety as uniquely fitting for each situation. I wonder if starting a collection of personal stories might add another dimension to these stories of reporting incidents at conferences or advertising in journals. A few excerpts from my experiences are below - please, I invite you to add your experiences to the collection, anonymously or pseudonymously as you like - so that we can create a realistic cornucopia of the world as it really is, flawed as it is, and sufficiently detailed so that the subtle aspects of discrimination can actually be understood.

In looking back on quitting my job as a systems/project engineer at a mid-size consumer products company, I realize the exact moment of the first crystal of realization it was time to leave. In the midst of a product crisis, all engineers were on deck and emailing all day and night, crossing oceans to manufacturing and back, about potential solutions. As the only systems engineer on the project I had naturally been included on all communications and was well prepared for a Thursday 8am to discuss.

At the meeting, software, electrical, quality teams gave updates and there were no surprises. When the mechanical team rose, and spoke, they referenced an entirely new design which had developed early the previous evening and had, over the course of the night, become a front-running candidate.

I had never heard of this design. The rest of the team (including marketing and an intern) nodded their heads knowingly. I grabbed the computer of the engineer seated to my right to double-check, pulling up his e-mail. I found, recently, an entire e-mail chain I had been left off of. It included extensive details as well as discussion among the entire team - including the intern!

It meant, again, that I had been excluded and left off of a critical distribution list. It seems like such a small detail, but in the midst of a crisis when communication is already shot to hell by lack of sleep and politics, being left off an 'engineering' e-mail is like death.

I knew the mechanical engineering manager didn't give a shit about including me. I complained about this, to him, often. I would hear word of an interesting mechanical idea from an intern or my machinist friends, get it forwarded to me from one of them, and send it back to the manager with the request to include me the next time. I had complained so often that he had recently started yelling every time he sent an email out, "I'll send this to Janet, its an important one." This became particularly obnoxious as more and more inane forwards or strictly bureaucratic e-mails were also forwarded to me out of spite.

Yet it was all for show as crisis stress hit epidemic levels and higher level brain functions like being a teammate ceased. While some names, including the intern and marketing manager were added to the To: field, mine was left off entirely. E-mail is rather damming in this way as the trail of headers and forwards paints an interesting picture of who considered who, and when.

At one juncture, the program manager was added as well as the rest of the team - just excluding me. I had previously asked the program manager to invoke the use of project lists as email chains inevitably grew thermonuclear and twisted during a crisis. I reminded him frequently and created a general list just for this purpose, to avoid being left out!

At what point does it become personal, and you begin feeling excluded or left out? Is it the first time, the third, the fifth, the sixth in as many days, the tenth, the twentieth? Fingers AND toes? At some point - it's too much.

I bubbled over, screamed, and threw a plastic assembly about 6" long x 3"wide x2.5"tall directly at the table in front of the mechanical engineering manager. I remember my words exactly: "I'm on your fucking team." I started crying, shamelessly, in front of everyone. I was so ragefully angry and fed-up and distraught. It was 8:30AM on a Thursday morning.

Later that day I already could laugh about it. I apologized, was glad there was no serious injury inflicted, and requested again that the team use distribution lists and make that much more of an effort to include me in conversation. Life continued, albeit after an awkward *family chat* with my project manager and the mechanical engineering manager I had hucked the part at, in which he told us we were both his rocks and needed to be strong to support the rest of the team.

Life continued, and I still worked. But the crystal that precipitated that day attracted more and more energy to it - began building, layer by layer.

I never got along the same way with the mechanical engineering manager. Our previous disdain gave way to outright hostility. He sent me e-mails when he saw me walk by or was reminded of my existence. He still forgot, a lot of the time. I signed a buddy up to check, each time he received a project-related e-mail of importance, that my name was also on the distribution list or to add me immediately. I probably should have done that in the first place - but I hadn't realized how much I still needed someone to watch my back on my team.

I quit my job approximately 5 months later, thinking that engineering was not for me. I am glad that I returned, because it is who and what I am.